Up until the last two weeks, I've never gotten so much as a "real"/non-form rejection from any of the bigger markets that pay pro-rates. Now I've had two, from two different magazines for different stories. Leaving out the names of the stories and magazines, they were:

"I was very impressed with [the story], which I found fast paced, well written, and exciting. You have a solid sense of character and setting, which we don't see all that often. Unfortunately, it's not as original as a handful of other stories I'm currently considering. I'm afraid I'll have to return it, with genuine regrets."

and

"Thank you for submitting [the story] to [the magazine], but we've decided not to accept it for publication. We thought you did a great job of bringing these characters to life and making them feel real, but in the end the core plot felt a little too generic."

This is, of course, frustrating on all sorts of levels--I mean, the plots seemed breath-takingly cool to *me,* so how come no one else is smart enough to think so? (-: --but I guess the more rational part of me still sees this as a good milestone and a pretty good place to be immediately pre-Clarion.